2023-04-15 22:01:06
EUROKINISSI/GIORGOS EUSTATHIOU
“We often say that death is the source of religion. We should rather put it in a much more radical way, because death is probably the source of human self-consciousness itself, one of the primary forces of humanizing man. By “death” here, of course, we mean the consciousness of death. Bataille wrote that “man is the animal that is aware of his death”.
This is stated by the essayist Fotis Terzakis, in the introduction to the collective volume “Death and eschatological visions: religious-historical perspectives” (Archetype publications). After all, man is the only one in the animal kingdom who bury his dead, as he mentions.
Therefore, and given that all nature follows the cycle of existence-decay-death, the victory over death can be defined as a world-historical and transcendental event that transcends human measures and reaches the limits of the metaphysical and the “divine”. ! It is no coincidence that all the religions around the Mediterranean basin include the myth of the “dying God”, that is, the God who dies and then rises again.
As is well known, Christianity made use of the old pagan holidays in order not to radically disrupt the habits and customs of centuries of pagan customs. So he made sure that Easter coincided, approximately, with the Anthesterias, a festival in honor of Dionysus, during which the Athenians, as well as the inhabitants of many other Ionian cities, went to the countryside to admire the flowering nature and, at the same time , to open the pithos (barrels) to taste the first wine of the year. That is why the first day of the Anthesterias was called pithoiya.
In our country now, we celebrate the Resurrection of the Lord and his victory over death, but another kind of “revolution” is imposed, a word derived from epi+inistimi, that is, I rise up, I stand upright.
Symbolically, then, we too, individually and collectively, must defeat another death, that of our daily lives. And what is this death? Everything that does not allow life to flourish and develop: colossal inequalities, poverty, hunger, disease, underdevelopment, environmental pollution, the elimination of biodiversity and, above all, climate change, which threatens human race than anything else in millions of years of history.
The coming electoral battle should translate into a crushing of the forces of those who have openly sided with death: who sell off public property, privatize common goods and systematically and methodically “cut down” Health, Education and the Welfare State in all its manifestations.
The government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, by far the most destructive during the post-colonial period, must not only be defeated, but crushed and never rise again. This hybrid of wild neoliberalism and far-right ideology must not survive the election. The government of the Predator, the EYP, the EL.AS, the massive corruption, the subterfuge of Justice and repression must go “yesterday”.
The “Newspaper of the Editors”, as far as we can and with our small powers, have been contributing to serious revelations about all of this lately. So we ask for your support to continue to exist and play our role as an independent cooperative newspaper. We wish you a good Resurrection and, perhaps, a little (re)Resurrection!
*Tasos Tsakiroglou is editor-in-chief of efsyn.gr.
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